Tuesday, June 07, 2005

Buried in the 700-plus page energy bill currently under debate in the U.S. Senate is a provision that provides hundreds of millions of dollars worth of federal loan guarantees for a power project apparently to be built by four former Enron executives. One of the former executives is Thomas White, former head of Enron’s retail and energy trading in California during the energy crisis who later served as President Bush’s Secretary of the Army.

Public Citizen’s investigation to find out who this loan would benefit narrowed the answer to just one company: Houston-based DKRW Energy. This company, named after the four Enron executives that founded it – Jon C. Doyle, Robert C. Kelly, H. David Ramm and White – formed a subsidiary, Medicine Bow Fuel & Power, to develop a $2.8 billion coal gasification project in Medicine Bow, Wyo.

“Congress should not be in the business of slipping taxpayer subsidies into large bills to benefit individual corporations, especially executives from a company that perpetrated one of the greatest corporate frauds in American history,”

The federal loan guarantee makes taxpayers responsible for repaying the loan if the company defaults, or if the project ends up not being economically feasible after its construction.